Shaving Cream Marbling Autumn Leaves

Create some beautiful Autumnal leaves using a simple marbling technique with shaving cream, paint and glitter! Beautiful for creating Fall displays at home or in the classroom!It’s been a long time since we first had a go at shaving cream marbling! It’s such a wonderful combination of sensory, art and colour exploration and is the perfect introduction to the marbling technique for young children. The results are always beautiful and can be turned into anything you like, from wrapping paper, to gift cards or seasonal garlands.

First, spray a can of economy shaving cream into a shallow tray and spread it out. Squeeze yellow and red paint over the top and mix it in using a paintbrush. Pop did this herself, then sprinkled plenty of gold glitter over the top!

We then laid pieces of paper onto the top of the foam and carefully lifted them off again. We used a piece of scrap card to scrape off the excess shaving cream and set them to dry. The scraping step is important or else the paper becomes logged with moisture and won’t dry properly. Even with scraping, the marbled effect seems to stay on the paper really well!

It feels absolutely wonderful and is well worth a squidge while waiting for the finished papers to dry out! Playing with shaving cream is a fantastic sensory experience by itself, as well as being a marvellous medium for practising mark-making and letter formation too!

Pop loved drawing in the leftover shaving cream after we had lifted the prints and you could probably lift off successful prints from marks and drawings that are made too, in much the same way as we made these Van Gogh style finger paint prints recently.

When the papers were dry I cut out lots of leaf shapes and we stuck them on the wall to look like they were falling down from a tree. Then we read one of our favourite Lois Ehert books, Red Lead, Yellow Leaf and used it as a discussion starter about the Autumn season, why leaves change colours and what animals do when the weather gets colder.

I love this Blog! Your ideas are amazing and so easy to do. Im also an early years teacher and mum of a two year old. Since having my daughther I have fallen in love with the early years and play all over again mainly due to your wonderful website and inspiring ideas. Thank you